Be Easy to Buy From
Intro
After over 18 emails with an SDR, a sales rep and their manager, I finally got an order form I needed, but there was one issue. They over quoted me, and I lost trust in them.
This is the life of a buyer. We often find ourselves succumbing to the struggles of technology companies as they ramp up their sales process. One of the biggest nightmares for a CSO is that they realize their sales team is not following the sales process, oftentimes leading to distrust from their customers. SDRs, inside sales reps, enterprise sales reps, and even sales managers on their first day of their job have been trained to handle one type of buyer: the slow, uneducated customer. Slow buyers are typically the individuals who are in the early stages of figuring out which product, service or solution might be best suited to solve their problems. These are cautious buyers who are entertaining all information from every vendor and are often overwhelmed with information. Until recently, the market was oversaturated by slow buyers, so companies built a thorough sales enablement playbook to train newly hired sales reps on how to deal with this type of customer. This type of customer is typically secretive, closed, and unpredictable. They don’t let the supplier fully in on their problems and they sometimes lie about how much power they have in the decision process or budget. As a result, thousands of software companies developed their sales process and sales enablement to solve this type of customer. However, as fast moving educated buyers have emerged, companies must retool their playbooks and find new digital channels for the fast buyer to transact. Derecho allows suppliers to cater to this type of growing population by providing a superhighway for their customers to transact. We call it goDerecho self-checkout!
Intro
A more blunt question is, is your CSO able to adapt to the fast shift in software sales?
We are now experiencing a digital transformation in both the way we work and the hyper automation we are experiencing in business and as consumers. Overnight our world was disrupted by a deadly virus and has held a gun to almost every business leader’s head. Leaders overnight were forced to adjust and survive in the new remote economy. However, not every leader adapted in speeds necessary, and a lot of regressive software sales leaders resorted to Zoom as a life raft to continue the traditional sales strategy. If you’re a CSO and Zoom makes up 50% of your digital sales strategy, you better warm up that resume! It’s only a matter of time when your CEOs and CFOs realize that the fastest growing generation of technology buyers are already demanding a more automated buying process. Are you two steps ahead? Remember, consumers move much faster than businesses. If you look back at the most recent innovations of the decade, it’s really amazing how technology has allowed consumers to consume quickly and often. From clicking a few buttons then gaining access to thousands of movies and tv shows, to customizing and buying an electric car all online within minutes, to being presented over a thousand options of food to be delivered, the human experiences in the B2C world is now bleeding into what they will demand in the B2B ecosystem. Humans are acclimating to this era of fast decisions and receiving instant gratification, so the question of whether the CSO is a leader of sellers or selling really strikes a chord. Can CSOs adapt to how buyers are buying? Can he or she adapt their business and strategy to meet the new type of buyer at the bridge?
Educated Buyers Want to Run
Let’s face it, not everyone wants to deal with sales people. Why is this the case? Is it because we know how much commission they make off a sale? Is it because buyers are busy with their day jobs and cannot be dragged through a 7-stage sales process? Gartner believes it’s because 62% of learning about a product or service happens outside of an interaction with a seller. Buyers have as much stalker characteristics and access to information as the supplier has of the prospect. Tools such as Outreach(™), ZoomInfo(™), Lusha(™), Linkedin Sales Navigator(™) that allow a supplier to get personal and professional information of a prospect have dominated the GTM sales tool spend and have allowed suppliers to gain access to a treasure trove of data. Sales pipeline and forecast calls are literally stalker sessions where the supplier talks obsessively about gaining access to an individual or group of people who might buy their product or service. Suppliers then email, call, text, linkedin message, and deliver nice little care packages to those prospects.
Gartner- The Sense Making Seller
In today’s Go-to-Market, sales leaders are facing a new challenge in that the information about their product or service and their competition is so easily accessible and digital, that the buyers that are knocking at their door have already made up their mind, or are looking for that one piece of information to help them make a decision. If there isn’t a line outside your door with this type of buyer, it’s probably because you didn’t educate the market enough or at all. What happens when more than half of your customers come in hot ready to buy? You get the hell out of their way. Well not really, you provide them the tools to transact with as little friction as possible. True, sellers are usually hired to lubricate and actually facilitate a transaction but when there’s a fast moving customer coming at them, they often become friction. Take a look at a dialogue our co-founders had with a supplier. They asked for an order form and listed out what they wanted, but still it took several emails (and several days) to receive an order form that was then presented initially with the wrong pricing.
Derecho empowers buyers with self-service technology that allows buyers to complete a transaction via a credit card or order form transaction without needing to engage with a sales person. For the 62% of the educated buyers that want to move fast, it’s important to build a superhighway that allows them to buy and gain access to your product or service as quickly as possible with as little friction as possible.
Slow Buyers Also Want to Run Fast
Great, you have a prospect that has officially committed to buying your product after a 6 month sales cycle, and so now the paperwork process begins. Can your back office generate contracts in seconds? On average it takes over 16 emails between the buyer, seller, and back office deal desk/legal teams to generate an order form and other documents needed to complete a sale. Typical software company’s back office is not tooled to mass produce order forms and contracts.
Over the course of several decades, automotive industries began to democratize the car ownership experience and as automobiles became more of a necessity versus a luxury, every household owned a car. As the car buyer became more demanding and production increased, manufacturers had to quickly innovate and automate their assembly line. In today’s automotive manufacturing, nearly 80% of the work to produce 1 automobile is done by software powered robots. Applying automation to the creation of order forms and contract documents are vital to reducing back office cost, lead time, and even can significantly delight the customer by serving them instantly. Derecho automates the shopping cart experience, empowers buyers to choose what product and quantity serves them best, and facilitates the credit card purchase or execution of the contracts all in a matter of seconds. Essentially, Derecho allows suppliers to outsource the back office tasks to software.
In Conclusion
Whether your business typically deals with the fast moving, educated buyers or the slow, uneducated buyer, Derecho acts as the platform that allows you to cater to both by automating a lot of the traditional sales processes. We’ve simplified go-to-market by making the following turn-key:
- Providing a white labeled product and pricing listing page that is code-less and quick to stand up in a matter of minutes. We let your product engineers focus on product innovation and not on building self-service from scratch
- Automating the self-service credit card transactions (high velocity deals)
- Automating the self-service order form generation and execution process (enterprise deals)
- Automating and simplifying the playbook of processes that happen after a transaction is completed (Welcome packet, invoicing/collections, subscription management, upsell and renewal orders, and customer surveys and reviews)
- Empowering your existing sales org to automate the quote-to-cash process
- Enabling all suppliers to be open for business 24/7 365.
